Question How to Recover Data from an Inaccessible/RAW External Drive that goes into a hang when connected to PC?

[deb.ash]

Hi,

I have a 1 TB Seagate External Drive containing legacy data, comprising large size videos [MKV, MP4 and AVI], pictures, and ebooks [MOBI and PDF]. It is almost full with only around 1 GB free space.

A few days ago, when I connected the drive to my desktop PC, it went into a hang and froze. And the option of soft eject stopped working and the external drive had to be physically disconnected from the PC. This now happens every time I try connecting the external drive to the PC. It does show up on Windows Explorer, but again goes into a hang when I try to click the drive.

I ran CHKDSK on the drive with the R parameter at the command prompt and received the following message:" The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives."

Now, I understand that a RAW drive means a corrupt/inaccessible drive, which needs to be formatted. But before doing so, I wish to retrieve all the data on it. I tried a few Data Recovery software. But again, the moment I connect the external drive to the PC, the data recovery software goes into a hang [I checked up to 2 hours] while displaying the message that it is "retrieving the drive information."

Can anyone suggest a way around this hanging problem as I really need to recover all the data on the external drive? Is the long wait time taken by the software due to the large volume of the data on the drive and should I give it more time to try to read the drive? Or is there any other solution?

My desktop PC runs Windows 7 Professional, 64 bit.

Thanks!

 

[rgd1101]

it the data is really important, send it for professional data recovery

also, should have backup.